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The Role of Gesture as Simulated Action in Reinterpretation of Mental Imagery
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Abstract
In the current confirmatory study, we conducted two experiments that examined the role of gesture in reinterpreting a mental image. In the first experiment, we observed that participants gestured more about figures they had learned through manual exploration than about figures they had learned through vision. Experiment 2 investigated whether such gestures have a causal role in affecting the quality of mental imagery by manipulating participants’ gesture activity.
Successful problem solving relies on the availability of suitable mental representations of the task domain. Especially for more complex problems, there might be a wide variety of possible problem representations, and it might even be beneficial to change them during problem solving. In a first part, we argue that investigating the dynamics of understanding in terms of dynamically changing problem representations is an underexplored aspect of problem solving research, and that most classic tasks even preclude the opportunity of such dynamics to occur. Continuing this theoretical discussion, as an illustrative example of a task designed for the exploration of such representational dynamics, the second part of the paper discusses a novel, complex spatial transformation and problem solving task. In this task, one is asked to repeatedly mentally cross-fold a sheet of paper, and to predict the resulting sheet geometry without the use of external aids. Through its deliberate openness and difficulty, this task requires finding new and more efficient representations – ranging from kinaesthetic and visuospatial imagery to symbolic notions. We present an overview of the task domain and discuss various ways of representing the domain as well as potential dynamics between them.
The Gesture as Simulated Action (GSA) framework was proposed to explain how gestures arise from embodied simulations of the motor and perceptual states that occur during speaking and thinking (Hostetter & Alibali, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 495–514, 2008). In this review, we revisit the framework’s six main predictions regarding gesture rates, gesture form, and the cognitive cost of inhibiting gesture. We find that the available evidence largely supports the main predictions of the framework. We also consider several challenges to the framework that have been raised, as well as several of the framework’s limitations as it was originally proposed. We offer additional elaborations of the framework to address those challenges that fall within the framework’s scope, and we conclude by identifying key directions for future work on how gestures arise from an embodied mind.
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